Children's Responses to “Do You Remember …” Questions About Their Memory

Abstract

Children's failure to distinguish the literal and implied meaning of “Do you remember …” (DYR) questions can lead to misunderstandings and damage their credibility as witnesses. We examined 65 children's (4–10 years) responses to wh- and yes/no questions about a cartoon video. Questions probed about true, false, and unanswerable details. Question format was manipulated as a within-subjects variable: half the questions were asked directly and half were prefaced with DYR. Most children provided unelaborated “yes” or “no” responses (i.e., referential ambiguity) to DYR yes/no questions. Requests for clarification revealed children were twice as likely to indicate their referentially ambiguous responses were answering the explicit DYR question when asked about false details (24%) than true details (9%). Pragmatic failure (i.e., unelaborated “yes” responses to DYR wh- questions) was most often observed when questions probed about true event details. As age increased, children were less likely to demonstrate referential ambiguity and pragmatic failure.